Read the characters and you get something close to beautiful trust — gracious confidence, a name for a private bank or a school motto.
美孚 was how Standard Oil of New York did business in China. Its kerosene lamps — Mei Foo lamps — went into an enormous number of households in the early twentieth century, sold cheap or given away so that people would then need the oil. The name was chosen the way brand names are: it sounded roughly like the company and it meant something reassuring.
The company kept an oil depot on the western edge of Kowloon. When the depot closed, the land was redeveloped into one of Hong Kong’s first large private housing estates, 美孚新邨 — Mei Foo Sun Chuen — and the estate kept the oil company’s name. When the MTR arrived, the station took the estate’s name. When the English signage was made, it transcribed the Cantonese reading of a Chinese brand name that had originally been transcribed from English.
So the full circuit runs: Mobil → 美孚 → Mei Foo Sun Chuen → Mei Foo station, and somewhere in the middle the meaning beautiful trust attached itself to a petroleum distributor and then to a place where a hundred thousand people live.
Why this is the useful entry
Because it’s the clearest case of a rule that runs through the whole Hong Kong map: the literal reading of a name and the reason for the name are frequently unrelated, and the literal reading is almost always more charming.
You can enjoy gracious confidence — it’s genuinely there in the characters, and any Cantonese speaker reading the sign sees it. But the thing that actually happened is a kerosene lamp, and knowing both at once is the point of this section.